An Almost
by Croire
Summary: When Kensi is taken hostage during a raid gone wrong, she must allow herself to remember a piece of her past that she has long since forgotten.
1. Prologue

_Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS: LA, or any of it's characters. I'm simply borrowing them for literary purposes._

Reviews are appreciated!

**Prologue: **

Half-hidden in the slanted evening shadows of the bayside pier. Three of you with guns, and more crouched in corners with pistols and hands at the ready. Waiting for footsteps and all you find is silence.

Somewhere, in a distance that is not entirely out of your reach, you recall when this day was still something you could only dream about. And then you remember that justice is subjective and that words can sting more than punches. You are far too gone to save yourself.

A woman slinks across a patch of sunlight, and you all tense because you have been waiting for this to happen for such a long time.

(_A childhood that was yours, and was almost hers. How you forgot before you even knew you remembered and how free she already was.)_

Six seconds and you do not breathe.

(_And this cannot end well and you have all started off on the wrong foot because it's what you do best.)_

Emilio could not have planned it better, because she moves almost perfectly into your line of fire, and the weapon is raised and ready before your mind has caught up with what you are doing.

Strong voices and weak little feet that will never run fast enough to save your sleeping little heart. You were young, and maybe you still are, but you were never innocent enough to be pitied and never alive enough to die.

Waiting for a signal. The men that have come with her are not as light on their feet, and they fumble along behind her like small children in a single file line. As if they have come ready to be taken out like accessories. They shiver and peer into the darkness, but they will never make the connection.

It's all part of the plan and they will play their parts perfectly, for they always do.

She is looking right at you, but does not quite understand the stillness that surrounds her.

Two seconds longer and you want to call out but don't.

(_There is a small stir from somewhere above you, beginning in a second of leftover time._)

It begins with the creak of a floorboard and the crack of a gun that is not your own.

Fire seems to erupt from the earth itself and it almost breaks you to see the panic in her eyes. The men around her fall in tandem, as if this scene has been rehearsed and perfected. Some have made it behind the crates that take up much of the room, and you watch her tend to the wounds of one of the fallen.

Hands working furiously to bind the gunshot that has made him useless, she will waste her time on someone who can only slow her down and you are slightly stunned but mostly sad.

(_Mind focused on her task, as if she may not really die here and this is just a game that neither of you really wanted to play._)

Emilio grabs the woman from behind and you think that she never had a chance. Kicking and clawing, but they grab her by the neck and she falls limp much too quickly for your comfort.

You worry that they have been too harsh.

But you follow them all out of the boathouse in a rush, only pausing as you pass the agent she had been helping. Blood trickles from a gash in his thigh.

He will live.

"Wh-why?" The words tremble, and they are answered with a shrug and the wringing of hands.

Because they have convinced themselves that she has answers and that this is their chance. To make amends and to make it big and to make it count for something. To replace the echoes of empty rooms that ate them all up and all the funerals they never attended.

You step over his aching form, the crescent scar on your shoulder pulsing suddenly and fearfully.

For those brown eyes of hers are foreign and familiar. Because this is long past due and still all too soon.

They are asking all the wrong questions and running in circles and it all leads to boathouses and graveyards eventually because this is wrong and they have only just started.

She has left behind a trail that she might not be able to retrace. Two decades and two hundred wrong turns to find her.

And oh, how you pray.

**xxx**

_She comes to know them by the sound of their footsteps, the smell of their breath. _

_Heavy boots and silent homecomings. She draws pictures in the dust, sits criss-cross and does not make a sound. The walls are falling down and the storm is always moving in, but she feels some sort of safe in the silence because she knows all their secrets anyways._

_She was supposed to be a boy_.

_She was supposed to grow up to be big and strong and someone they could all be proud of, and she came out sticky and pink and did not cry. _

_They say her mother died from the grief of bearing the bright-eyed child, and they do not speak of her father, so she decides that she does not have one. _

_Unafraid and so eternally disappointed. The hall outside her room smells like sweet tobacco and the smoke stings her eyes at night. She is three and half years old, and counts on her fingers and reads the books they leave her when they think no one is looking. _

_Red is her favorite color until she is whipped for standing too close to the doorway and bleeds all over her dark blue dress. White is her favorite color until she realizes that in white, she cannot hide. So she shrinks into the black shadows and calls it home and it is familiar and safe and she likes it there. _

_There is an old nurse who bathes her once a week, who sings her sweet songs and gives her sad looks. _

"_Anjinho," the woman murmurs in her ear as she lays the young girl down to sleep. "How very empty your life shall be." _

_And the child grips her wrinkled hands tightly and whimpers at the idea of being alone again. So the night becomes something that reads like a short story, tales of daring escapes and brave brave soldiers who never came home._

_When the world outside the damp walls that surround them both becomes harsh and unforgiving and neither really wants to leave but one always does.  
__The expectations she will never meet and the person she cannot become._

"_Anjinho," the woman murmurs in her ear, and the words are sad and they mean something that she is still too young to understand. _

_She asks about her father one day because she cannot pretend forever and the answer is distant and not all there.  
__She asks if she will ever meet him and the answer is a soft laugh and the ruffling of hair.  
__She asks about the other children, because she hears them outside her walls and wonders about them sometimes._

_So the nurse sets her down on the small cot._

_Tells her that there are nine parts to every story._

_And she will tell them to her one by one. _


	2. Chapter One

**Sorry for the wait! Thank you for your support!**

**Disclaimer: CBS owns everything.**

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The rain is oddly fitting, synchronized traffic lights and car horns that are not theirs. A cell phone is attached to Callen's ear as he steers, and Sam whispers to Hetty from his own.

Voicemail.

"Shit." He drops it into his lap. And thinks how very wrong this is.

Somewhere between an empty warehouse and false promises of information. Divide and conquer, and they have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the path. This is not how they thought this would happen.

"We've been set up G," Sam closes the phone and Callen's grip tightens as he swerves because this is something he already knew. "Somehow," he continues, sighing as he speaks. "Somehow they knew we'd send her to the pier."

It is days like this where Callen wants to kill Deeks, wants to fight and yell, because he has sent an agent of his off alone with men he does not trust, and now she is gone. As if the liaison could prevent from going undercover. As if, in all honesty, he believed in that man any more than the others.

"What happened to the LAPD guys that were with her?" His voice is rough and Sam's eyes flash back out to the road in front of them as the water nears.

"Four wounded, two dead. One was conscious, but he's out now."

You imagine her in the back of another dark van. Sticky California heat and black and blue all over. Falling asleep to wasted heartbeats and no second chances.

_She must be calling your name, wherever she is, because her voice haunts you now._

You call her again with the same result.

They leave the car running when they get to the beach, men in official looking costumes stream up and down the white sand. They glance at the two absently, but do not stop what they are already doing.

The last of the ambulances pulls away with the wailing of sirens. Sam breaks into a jog at the sight of crimson on the wooden floor of the pier. Tire tracks on the sidewalk.

_Somewhere, someone is dying. And oh how it feels like them._

"What's going on?" the question is half-shouted, and does not mean exactly what it initially implies. An officer, hat almost covering his eyes, mouth set in a frown, turns to greet them.

"What's going on in here!" this is louder, and the man nearly jumps. Callen pushes past them both and enters the room.

_Scarlet letters are nothing when compared to the dusty white ghosts that hover just over your shoulder. _

The walls are dented and wet. Blood and bullets, and this was an ambush and this was planned so very well.

"Sam." His voice is weaker now, a little less steady, because this usually happens to him, and he does not know how to handle the loss as they do. Sam is silent behind him, having been briefed already. The two have long since fallen into a pattern of silent shortcomings and last-minute agreements. Callen has never given much thought to last words, but now seems as good a time as any and he shivers at the possibilities of what she might have said.

What she might be saying now.

Footprints line the floor before them. All with measured distances between the feet, all official and okay. The intruders have left them with nothing more than casings and a sense of unease they will not shake for a long time coming.

Sam speaks first.

"Let's get back to Hetty and Eric, they might be having more luck on their end."

If Kensi were here, she might have volunteered to work the scene herself. And she might have found something, because it is her job and she does it well. And she did not mean to be taken in the rush of hastily made decisions.

You wonder if anything ever turns out the way you originally intend for it to.

You hit every red light on the way home.

**xxx**

_The contents of a story have always mattered more than the outcome, and the young girl shivers beneath her bed sheets late at night because the walls close in around her when she sleeps. _

_She is unsure of the time. There are no windows and there are no clocks. _

_It is possible that there is more to her world than heartbreak, but she grows slightly and doubts it. _

_The old woman leaves one morning and does not come back. _

_The footfall from beyond her door increases. _

_The whole world seems to darken, and she is alone. _

**xxx**

"Guys," Eric calls to the two agents as they enter the building, "you might want to see this."

And there are five men in a black van, and it is Kensi's apartment. Hetty's shoulders slump and Nate's grip on the table tightens. And they know where to look now, and are not at all confident on what they might find.

Once, not too many months ago, Callen promised to bring back a friend and could not.

Once, only years ago, Sam was a Navy SEAL and killed a father and saved his son.

They have done this dance before.

**xxx**

_She wakes up to the sound of keys, hands bound and eyes bright. Someone sits in the shadows and watches her blink, but does not move. _

"_Kensi Blye." _

_And it is a name, and it is hers. So she holds her head up high and they laugh. _

_The door swings shut. _

_There has never been another way for this to end. _

_But it has only begun._

**xxx**

You watch her from the corner of the cell. Bound and restless, she notices your presence but does not look in your direction. Emilio will come for her soon, and then she will play his game.

If only because she has no choice.

"Kensi Blye."

She almost flinches at the sound of your voice. The roughness of your tone startles you as well. Silence stretches on, and you are not sure what comes next.

The door to the small room swings open, and the man you might have warned her of, but knew you wouldn't all the same, enters. Glances at you with confusion that does not last as you lean back in your chair to watch, and he moves so he is in front of her kneeling frame.

"You will talk."

_Of explosions and of scars, lost information and last ditch-efforts. _

Her dark brown eyes show her confusion at the statement, and you fear that this will go nowhere good.

That you will be asking the same questions forever.

He reaches down and grabs her matted hair, pulls her up slightly so that their faces nearly touch.

"You are far from home," he drops her here, and drags a wooden chair out so that he can sit in next to the door and watch her breathe deeply. "Far from your friends.

You have seen her friends, the two men that travel with her, watching her back and keeping her in sight. Almost as if, they too, knew she was not safe.

"I won't be here for long." She spits the words out at his feet, yanking against her restraints as she speaks.

Emilio does not answer her.

The silence pulls at your skin, chips away at your heart.

You wonder exactly when your spirit broke.

You wonder when hers will as well.

Emilio stands suddenly, giving you a nod as he strides out of the room.

"Take care of our guest." His grin is hidden behind the opening of the door, and he leaves in a cloud of dust. The woman before you will not meet your eyes, for the second time. You do not mind.

You know all too well of your own regretful eyes that gaze sadly back at you in your bedroom mirror. This life has become dependent on the memories of a girl who lost them so very long ago.

**xxx**

_He must have been about four years old the first time he heard of her. Rumors about a daughter, hidden away within the walls of their crumbling hideout. He only knew that he could hear someone crying when he listened hard enough, and that he'd lost his own father to the tainted smoke that surrounded the business. _

_He knows now that the transporting of illegal drugs is a highly risky one._

_But he was young, and he could only run down the damp hallways, hoping that one day he'd be allowed outside and that maybe one day the crying would stop. _

_The building collapses in the heat of an explosions that leaves them stranded in a desert, ashy and bruised. They are children and they are scared, and so they run._

_He only carries an envelope. One that his father stuffed in his hands right before he disappeared out the door for the last time. Right before the only home he'd ever known was lost._

_Right before the search for a revenge that was not his to take began._

**xxx**


	3. Chapter Two

**Disclaimer: CBS owns everything.**

**Reviews are appreciated! Thank you to everyone who already has.**

**

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_xxx_

"_Jason, get in here!"_

_Her skin tingles under the heat of the burning room. Cool fingers that lift her roughly from the floor nearly startle her out of her reverie, but not quite. _

"_Jason! Dammit." _

_Through the haze that has become familiar, she blinks up into a face that is filled with fear. The man cannot be any more than twenty five. Covered in ashes with a swollen lip, he uses his free hand to speak into a radio as he carries her out of the flames. When silence greets his urgent requests for help, he curses once again. _

"_Não tenha medo," she can feel her lips moving, the words taste like acid on her tongue. The man glances down at her trembling body and winces. _

"_I'll get you out of here kid, don't worry." He ducks around another corner, and she wishes that the hallway would stop spinning so much. Soft words continue to float from her rescuer's mouth as she drifts away, unfazed by his jostling arms. _

_She sleeps soundly, and dreams of a place far from the burning bricks of her childhood prison._

_xxx_

Callen shakes his head angrily.

"It'll take us weeks to figure out what could be missing."

Eric's sigh from the other end of the line offers him little help. Sam continues sifting through the mess that lay before them both.

"They don't appear to be leaving with anything either," Eric admits. "Whatever they were after, they don't appear to have found it."

Callen snaps his phone shut and crosses the room to join his partner. "They're awfully interested in her father, G. They went through an entire album of his pictures, and then overturned a bookshelf." He shakes his head. "And I'm betting that Kensi didn't destroy one of her father's pictures either."

Sam picks up the photograph in question from where it lay.

The man that smiles back up at him is long dead, from what he can gather from an outdated personnel file and the look in Kensi's eyes that they all pretend not to notice.

She has only spoken of him once.

_xxx_

_It had been a rough day, to say the very least._

_And if either of them had been in the mood to elaborate, they might have said that it was more of a trying day, filled with vicious suspects and parents of Marines whose tears fell through the phone lines. Sam found her leaning over the railing that overlooked the bullpen. He approaches her almost tentatively. _

_The look in her eye is less of a warning to keep his distance than it is an apology for all that she might say._

_"What does it mean to be lonely?" The question is soft, and he almost misses the uncertain words. Her fingers drum a crooked rhythm against the metal. _

_"I'm not sure you know what you're asking." And he is nothing if not honest. She smiles at the response, because she knows that this was not the direction he expected the conversation to take. Loneliness is something that has found a home in the hearts, but they have always kept it to themselves. They all live behind the lie that everything is fine and it always has been._

_When Kensi asks him what it means to be lonely, she is asking him to share a part of himself._

_She presses on anyways. _

_"No, I mean it. What does it mean to be lonely?" _

_He hesitates. _

_They do not often delve into each other's personal lives. Because then he might mention things like his daughter, and all her warmth, or his wife, and all her secrets. The more you share, the less you have left to hide behind when things go wrong. He shifts once more before answering._

_"It's not really a question, if you already know the answer, Kensi."_

_He swears that her eyes are shining._

_"What do you mean?"_

_Silence. She sighs._

"_When my father died, he left me a letter." She has stopped tapping her fingers now, rubbing them together nervously instead. _

"_A letter full of these apologies and regrets, and he told me that no matter what I found out about him later on, he loved me." _

_Sam doesn't move._

"_I didn't understand it," she laughs, "I still don't. All I knew was that I was completely lost to a family that wanted nothing to do with me, and every time I turned around, there was another dead end." _

"_Loneliness," she breathed, "tingled like kind of lost excitement that I couldn't contain because I didn't understand it. Like there was this whole other person just resting beneath everything I'd come to accept as real, just aching to come out and show me everything that could have been, if only I'd let it." There is a pause "And sometimes, even now, I wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath and clammy, because someone was telling me something important, but it was just too loud inside my own head for me to understand what they meant."_

_The bullpen has cleared out now, and while Hetty is undoubtedly lurking somewhere behind the walls, she has made herself scarce._

_"That doesn't make you any less real, you know." He does not meet her eyes._

_"Real?" _

_He nods, although he doubts that she is looking._

_"Just because you feel like someone else sometimes doesn't mean that you _are_ someone else. It just means that you're stuck in the middle of everything that's black and white and not quite gray either." _

_She is looking at him now, and he reaches out to untangle her hands from one another and squeezes them reassuringly. _

"_We've come to define this world in absolutes and consistencies, and we get mad when we realize that we can't box people into corners and leave them there. You are more than your own expectations and you are more than everything you dreamt that you could be. More than your father and more than your family."_

_Kensi looks away now, chewing her bottom lip. _

"_You asked me what it means to be lonely because it's easy to feel like you're the only one-"_

"_That isn't real." _

_They stand together in silence. And Sam aches for this girl, who is his friend, who has lost herself to the darkness that surrounds them all. For the letters that don't bring back your family, and the family who is really anything but that at all. _

_He doesn't tell her what loneliness is to him, because while for her he believes it is the fear of certainty, for him it is a void. _

_And if he was being totally honest (and he usually is not, when it comes to this sort of thing), he feels that loneliness is when you're sitting in that corner of black and white and suddenly coming to terms with the idea that you are meant for more than that._

_Because you've just made this life-changing discovery that no one else in the world is able to understand, because they're the ones who filed you away in the first place. _

_Loneliness is the gap that exists between that lunging realization, and finding a world that is not lost to a lack of color. _

_It is the space between emptiness, and life._

_Neither of them moved for such a very long time. She bleeds for a father that carried his secrets to the grave, and he cries for daughter and a wife that cannot save him from the emptiness inside his heart. _

_It is as close as either one of them get to honesty._

_And it will never really be enough._

_xxx_

The two agents burst back into the OPS room, the memory of Kensi and her secrets still burning at the forefront of Sam's mind.

"Eric, see what you can pull up on Kensi's father," Callen speaks for his partner, who explained bits and pieces on the drive back. They watch Eric shift through document after document, digging through the past of a man they do not know.

"Stop," Sam commands softly.

"A falsified birth certificate?" Eric voices his concern for the obvious error.

"Why would Lieutenant Blye need a false report to prove he's her father?" Callen mulls softly, not looking away from the screen.

"Because he's not," Sam asserts. "Maybe that's why he apologized to her in that letter. Maybe he's been keeping more secrets than she suspected."

"Keep looking into it Eric," Callen spins on his heel, Sam close behind.

"We need to find the rest of Kensi's family."

_xxx_

_The man in the corner says nothing, and she is grateful for the silence. Her mind is spinning from the bombardment of almost-memories that have begun to pound against the inside of her skull. This dirty floor and this damp, dark room are things that she feels she should know by touch. _

_As if from a life she once lived. _

_They have drugged her, of that she is sure. Chemicals creep through her veins and make her sluggish and sad. The whole world seems to be speaking in riddles, dreaming in rhymes of fonder moments, when she was not chained to a wall. And it's easy, she breathes, it's easy to live in the shadows because then you are not bound by expectations. But it is a wrenching memory, the time she spoke to Sam about loneliness, and she shivers. _

_It feels like June, in this cell, although she knows that it's not. And she thinks of all the years she has been alive and knows she is getting older, but wonders restlessly if she is really any wiser. She never asked to be special and she never asked to be ordinary, but she supposes that you get to be something, someday, all the same._

_And while she is certain about many things, she only believes in a few._

_The door slams open._

_Emilio strides in, lips pulled into a thin line, his gate stiff. He does not acknowledge the man in the corner any more than she does, and she wonders if the man is simply something she has created to not be so alone. _

"_Do you know why you are here?" Emilio's rough voice pulls her back to the present, and she tears her gaze away from the shadowed figure to her right. His tone is amused, if not slightly frustrated, and he leans against the doorway restlessly. _

_He seems to interpret her silence, although she is not sure what he decides. _

"_I watched your father burn," is what he eventually says, and laughs deeply at the way her eyes light up in anguish. "Burn until you couldn't even see the damage we'd caused."_

_This gives her pause. There had never been any mention of torture (although from these men, she'd believe it), and her heart twists at the thought._

"_Needless to say," Emilio's eyes are fixed on a point somewhere over her left shoulder, but his mind seems to be so very far away. "He did not have the answers we were looking for."_

_And she doubts that her lack of understanding is totally due to the drugs. And she doubts that this will every truly make sense. Emilio is now crossing the floor towards her shackled form._

_He bends down until they are eye to eye. _

"_Tell me," his breath smells of cigar smoke and liquor, "What do you know about a man named Amaro Solis?"_

_And although the name gives her pause, it cannot bring back the ghost of a man she does not know. Her questioning eyes hold no secrets, and Emilio shakes his head sadly. _

_He rises off the cold floor._

"_You will talk."_

_As he exits, the man in the corner stands. The movement does not startle her, but the pitying look in his eyes does, and she turns away as best she can._

_She is alone for only a moment._

_And when two new men enter, one with dozens of syringes that make her stomach clench, and another with only an angry smile, she cannot help but tremble. _

_The memory of her father's crumbling car._

_The pulsing feeling of familiarity that the darkness holds. _

_The idea that loneliness is something she can overcome._

_She hopes, with everything she has, that Callen and Sam are on their way. _

_xxx_


End file.
